Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.